Star Hunter glided silently while we strapped ourselves back in a few minutes later. Mayan had switched back to ‘professional Mayan’ and wasn’t really sparing any brain space away from her checklists. I didn’t know much about space travel, but I knew that it took special equipment and training to get up and down. Geez, I was a gomer.

“Are we good? You know the drill?” I asked nervously. Mayan nodded but said nothing, her eyes watching a screen. “One day, you’ll have to tell me where you learned all this. So far, all I know about you is fifteen months of flying hovercraft junkers.”

She grinned. “How old are you, Cheet?” she asked. Her body wiggled into the back of her seat and she pulled hard on her belts again.

“Twenty-seven.”

“Me too.”

That was close to what I figured, though I’d have chopped five years off of that. She was energetic, but a bit on the slim side, shorter than me. Maybe that’s why it gave the impression she was younger.

“So you’re saying you had a job before Phoenix?”

“Yep.”

“Oh, God. You flew lunar shuttles?” I gawked and turned as far in my seat to look at her as my belts would allow.

“Sort of. I was co-pilot on a few trips,” she confessed. “You have to rack up hours, and I was still a trainee. But I have lots of sim time, and the hovercraft piloting helped me hone flying in full grav near the ground. It’s a lot different from even the sky cities. We go so high up there. Taking off from the dirt, that’s an effort we don’t appreciate anymore.”

“You want to be an astronaut?” I clarified. She turned to smile at me.

“Sure,” she said easily. “I was on the list to fly to Mars.”

That would have been a big deal. Would have.

“Sorry about that.”

Mayan turned again. This time the smile was gone. “Lookit, what’s done is done and I’m not sorry. I told you that. We’re moving on here, ‘kay? Stop feeling sorry for me and start focusing on the task at hand. I’m getting us back to the ground here. You need to think about what we’re going to do when we get there. Help, Cheetah, use your brain.”

I couldn’t argue and had no sarcastic come back. Still a bit rattled from the escape and shocked by the space trip to be close to normal, I shut my mouth and took a deep breath.

“We’re going to have radar and probably satellite surveillance. What’s the plan?”

“Re-entry angle coming up, firing thrusters,” Mayan called out. The ship tipped and rolled again, this time angling the nose up higher than the tail, and a gentle nudge behind my back told me the thrusters ignited. Dark turned to light and fire erupted in spurts at first and then a solid wall blazing over the windscreen. “Speed, nine-five-five-zero knots, looking good.”

Star Hunter bumped and shuddered, harder than the first and the second time. A few warning bells went off, a buzzer for a quick second before Mayan switched it off. Her hand stayed steady on the stick, her eyes on the console. For ninety seconds, my guts squished into the back of my body and I contemplated my life choices.

A sudden drop in chaos and the sky was clear blue again. Mayan burst into action, switching back into a gravity-bound pilot.

“I’m going to make this look like an asteroid,” she told me. I looked at her like she was bat shit crazy. “Fast, Cheet, we’re going to come in really fast.”

“Yah, I got that part. But Star Hunter is no fighter jet, Mayan,” I reminded her. “I can’t imagine she has any maneuverability, considering she doesn’t even have wings!”

Mayan only smiled. The joystick in her hand shook, harder than it had in re-entry. “Trust me,” she murmured.

I didn’t want to mention that it was possible the reserve was protected by some sort of grid or laser-shield thing we hadn’t even considered. No one had had the time to even contemplate scenarios before deciding on this little, final send-off adventure. Ride or die, sure, I got that, but a little planning would have seen us at least hope to find the first map site. Maybe land like normal people and not pancake into the ground, for starters.

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“Approaching sector eighteen,” Mayan announced.

I had no idea what that meant, so I folded my arms and frowned like a spoiled shit while I looked out the window.

“Brace for impact,” she warned.

Considering we were still several hundred feet above the lush green canopy of the forest below, I didn’t react.

Big mistake.

I had never considered how short ten seconds really were. But Mayan had started counting and at seven, the shuttle abruptly tilted from nose down to flat level and by three, the windows went from bright light to dark green shade. My stomach rammed into my nasal cavity. Gripping the armrests did nothing to help it. The massive counter thrust to slow the ship before it slammed into the ground shook it again and the violent shuddering, even a groan thrown in for good measure, had me pretty convinced we’d exceeded some design limits.

“Holy shit,” I groaned when the pressure against my body eased.

Mayan leaned forward to see what she could out of the windshield, and we floated, hovering a bit, until I felt the ship rest gently on the ground. For a second, everything felt like it sagged in relief.

There was a cup holder insert in the smaller console beside me and the radio. I grabbed it and promptly threw up in it.

“Nice,” Mayan complained behind me, but she was flipping switches and calling out some checklist again.

I was jostled before my organs felt returned to their original positions.

Mayan leaned to grab the radio headset and put it on but shoved her vid at me. “Check our position using its GPS,” she ordered.

I gingerly took it, still breathing deeply through my nose. “3.4653° S, 62.2159° W,” I replied when I found it.

She nodded and turned the vid towards her, making me hold it while she continued to listen and tap it before showing it to me.

The reserve grid was now on the screen, and she nudged her chin at me. “Type in the coordinates now,” she whispered.

I did as she ordered and watched a red blip zoom in on a quadrant on the map. Clear as day, we had our position in the enormous jungle.

“The map location?” I asked and then rolled my eyes at myself. I didn’t need her approval to do basic shit. She was right. I needed to get into this game. When I had the two blinking lights, I nearly died. Somehow, Mayan had set us down within a mile of the old map’s instructions. “How the hell?”

She grinned victoriously, but it disappeared quickly. “They have our descent,” she reported. “But not an exact point of entry. Good, our fast approach confused them.”

“I’m sure this thing has a transponder thingy though,” I warned her. She nodded.

“Yes, it’s pinging away,” she agreed, but was moving fast now.

I watched her shove her things back into the pack.

“Get the toolkit. We’ll need to disable it or they’ll be on us before we can do anything,” she instructed.

I made to stand, but looked at my puke cup and frowned.

In a swift grab that miraculously didn’t spill any, Mayan took it and marched to the door. After a ten second delay waiting for it to swing wide and lock into position, she tossed it far out into the bush.

Both of us froze.

The smell. The air, thick, humid, hot but pungent… we breathed and breathed deeply again. Rich, oxygen-packed, clean air filled our lungs, and I wanted to cough but couldn’t figure out why. It was… intense!

“Oh my God!” Mayan whispered from beside me when I joined her at the door. “It smells like heaven!”

“That’s what we’re missing? I mean, it’s—I dunno, I can’t even describe it!”

“We gotta move,” she said and back-handed me in the stomach. “Get the kit.”

I regretfully worked to focus. If anything added more urgency to the need for stealth right at this moment, it was the unbelievable exposed truth of the off-limit forest we were in. Not only would the Unified not allow us to live now, having seen this hidden forest, but we were in a stolen ship as AWOL workers. Possibly looking to steal something.

At the back of the cockpit, we stored the equipment and tools in tight, efficient lockers, flush with the walls. I knew exactly what one to get and that the kit inside was brand new, never used. It would be complete and undamaged. I grabbed it and ran to the back to find Mayan.

She was already there with a panel open; her face lit by a blue flashing light. I leaned around to see she was moving aside a mass of TKT wiring. “Here,” she guided me to see. “That blinking light back there, it’s the beacon.”

I nodded and went to work, finally removing the black and unblinking transponder.

We stood looking at each other while she listened to the radio console again.

She nodded enthusiastically. “It went out! They lost contact with a beacon!”

I shot her thumbs up, felt dumb, and shoved my hands into my back pockets.

“OK, first things first. We need to make it there, which is not far,” she began and peered over the vid again at the map.

“Yeah, about that. How in the—”

“Not now,” she cut me off without looking up. “But if we can, we should consider water rations and anything edible. We don’t know how long we’ll be gone getting to the next site and what we’ll need there. I’d say we have an hour tops to find whatever it is here and an hour to get back. I’ve marked the ship in the vid. We shouldn’t have trouble finding our way. ”

Less than five minutes later, and with Star Hunter secured so no wandering critters could make a new home, we headed out with Mayan in the lead, her nose glued to the blinking light on the screen.

I looked back one time, knowing the ship would likely be safe for a while, but another glance upward told me we were harder pressed for time. We’d punched a massive hole in the constant cover of the green roof of the jungle and now a giant white bar of soap sat on the forest floor, sticking out like a sore thumb because there wasn’t a damn thing in this jungle like it and we hadn’t had the time to pull down some camouflage. If we made it back in time to leave again without the Uni’s coming down on us, I’d never again question my luck.